A year ago today, I got rear ended while sitting at a stop light. It was a full speed collision, which was enough force to push me into the car in front of me and the car in front of them. Though I sustained a semi-permanent injury, it could have been much worse, and I’m thankful that I was able to be treated almost immediately and recovered well over the course of the next several months.1
This happened shortly before I was about to embark on an epic road trip for a conference in Denver last November. I was able to replace my car within a few days of the accident, and so I left as scheduled just a couple of weeks after the accident.2 Besides driving up I-75 behind the remnants of Hurricane Nicole, the first leg of the trip to Knoxville was unremarkable. But, as I’ve mentioned here before, that was where the epic road trip ended with an abrupt return to Florida on the day I should have been driving to Kansas City.3
Since then, I’ve put almost 35,000 miles on this newest iteration of the Camry. This has included two separate Orlando-Dallas-Knoxville-Orlando loops and two separate Orlando-Dallas-Albuquerque-Dallas-Orlando mega loops, one of which I just got back from.4 However, it wasn’t until this last trip that several threads came together and I understood why that trip last November didn’t work.
Though I didn’t know it, in the months leading up to what would become the COVID pandemic, I was about to hit the Wall.5 As the authors of The Critical Journey describe it,
Our wrestling with the Wall plays a vital role in the process of our spiritual healing. The Wall represents the place where another layer of transformation occurs and a renewed life of faith begins for those who feel called and have the courage to move into it. The Wall represents our will meeting God’s will face to face. We decide anew whether we are willing to surrender and let God direct our lives.6
They go on to say that, “Fundamentally, it has to do with slowly breaking through the barriers we have built between our will and newer awareness of God in our lives.”7 Depending on the particular shape of your story and personality type, this experience can unfold in a multitude of ways. However, “the process of meeting the Wall requires going through the Wall, not underneath it, over it, around it, or blasting it. We must go through it brick by brick, feeling and healing each elements of our wills as we surrender to God’s will.”8
For me, this process has mostly related to recognizing and processing a backlog of emotions. Up until 2020, I was too busy to feel. Or, more accurately, I was too busy to pay attention to what I was feeling. As those emotions began to accumulate, they tended to come out sideways, which was unpleasant for anyone in close proximity.
In essence, I wasn’t really aware of how my emotions were driving my decisions. The first step was to get a better grasp of that, but unlike what you might have heard, knowing is not half the battle. Because there are layers to work through, you start with the acute spikes of emotion in the day to day and only later get into the chronic, on-going emotional states that you’ve either never attended to, or buried with busyness.
At the time of the accident, I had been on an almost two year journey of better grasping my emotions in the moment. Because I had just been in another accident 18 months prior, I could compare the two experiences. I noticed that I was much less overwhelmed and anxious, both at the scene and days later. And when I did start to feel anxious it was much more manageable.
But, as they say, the body keeps the score.
Besides the two accidents, numerous events through the course of 2020-2022 left me feeling helpless. For someone who values being in control and usually feels like they are, this was not an enjoyable experience to say the least. Over time though, the continued experiences of helplessness combined with a larger unfolding drama that I couldn’t escape. I didn’t quite realize it, but my day to day experience of life lacked a general sense of emotional safety.
So, when I was about to set off on a two day drive I had never taken before, in weather that was starting to look more wintery by the hour, my body said no. I experienced it as something verging on a panic attack, but without a clear cognitive component. I didn’t have racing thoughts or any clear sense of worry tied to the trip. But, in my bones, I knew I couldn’t go.
And yet, a few days later, I was able to set off for Dallas with only a slight uptick in anxiety. This was also true back in May, but rather than level off after I got to Dallas, it continued to build. I thought this might have been because of my paper presentation in class, but it continued to linger after. Having not connected the dots quite yet, it didn’t occur to me that this might because I was about to drive off into the desert where I’d only been once before.
Because of the experience I had last November, I wasn’t sure I would actually make the drive to Albuquerque from Dallas. Even the morning of, I was clearly more anxious than I would like, but brushed it off as excitement since they are so physiologically similar. Once I was there, it shifted to just excitement. I kept moving by driving up to Santa Fe the next morning, before ending the night in El Paso, so I had a more or less continuous hit of dopamine exploring a new state for a weekend.
With some trepidation, I made my way back from El Paso through the emptiness of West Texas, and by the time I was back in Dallas, it felt like I had successfully recalibrated. It felt like I needed to prove to myself I could take a road trip out into the unknown and everything would be alright.
Having proven that, and because of a discovery when I was there in May, I decided to go out to Albuquerque again on this last trip to Dallas. For the most part, the anxiousness around driving was back to normal levels. Or at least it was until I decided to venture further up and further in and go beyond Santa Fe until I made it to Taos.
While I was surrounded by the beauty of really being up in the mountains, I also began to realize how isolated and remote I was. This was certainly true in the sense of being in a place that you have to go to on purpose. But, it slowly dawned on me that not only was I almost three hours away from my AirBnB, I was more than a days drive away from anybody I knew. At that particular moment, no one really knew where I was, what I was doing, or where I was going.
As I set off to drive back to Albuquerque, I found myself driving on a remote highway with no lines or markings, and eventually no cell service. The sun was thankfully still high in the sky so I knew I wasn’t in one of those movies where the character gets stuck on the side of the ride as darkness falls. But, what should have been an enjoyable drive alone with my thoughts and music was marred by feeling unsafe in silence.
Depending on your level of agency, you have the ability to increase or reduce your sense of safety.9 In choosing to decrease mine in a completely new environment, it helped me realize that feeling unsafe had been far more normal for me over the past few years. I realized that driving out to Dallas was a relief from that, though the road in between temporarily felt less safe because of my accidents. After logging so many miles, I feel mostly back to normal, and less likely to just take for granted that if I set off on a trip, I’ll get where I’m going without incident.
So what does this all have to do with the Wall? Well, in order to really explain, I have to also explain the balloons, and that will take another newsletter entirely. To gesture in that direction though, there is a real sense in which I have been mostly trusting in my own ability to generate safety. But really starting back in 2016, and coming to a head through 2020-2022, I’ve realized I can’t actually do that. There is a need to surrender my constant need to figure it out and find comfort on my own. Paradoxically, finding what I’m looking for will require seeking discomfort at first, and that’s actually why I drove off into the desert a couple of weeks ago. But, what I discovered wasn’t quite what I had bargained for.10
Shoutout to Affinity Wellness Center and Dr. Baldasare for getting me back to being able to do the reps, rest, and repeat.
This was my third purchase of a new Toyota at my local Toyota dealership within an 18 month span. It’s weird being a regular at a car dealership, but I hope it helped me negotiate better by my third time doing it. Hopefully that’s a skill I don’t have to use again any time soon.
The second half of the trip went as planned, and you can read some of the reflections it stirred in the link at the beginning of the paragraph.
This is not the first time I will use a preposition to end a sentence with.
It’s not lost on me that I’m using an opening illustration of a car wreck and then talking about hitting a wall. I was never into Nascar (NASCAR?) growing up, but the one race I did happen to watch was the Daytona 500 where Dale Earnhardt fatally did just that.
Janet O. Hagberg and Robert A. Guelich, The Critical Journey: Stages in the Life of Faith, 2nd Ed (Salem, WI: Sheffield Publishing Company), 114.
Hagberg and Guelich, The Critical Journey, 115.
Hagberg and Guelich, The Critical Journey, 119.
Although I won’t get into it here, I wanted to at least acknowledge that for some people, especially children, but certainly other weak and vulnerable people, there is not the ability to increase their sense of safety. Living in a chronically unsafe environment is something I only had a small taste of, and so I can only imagine the severe and lost lasting effects of growing up in that environment (or being stuck living in it with no end in sight).
Some of you are bothered by the fact that I ended this sentence, and newsletter as a whole with a preposition. You may have heard it said that one shouldn’t do that because it is grammatically incorrect, but I say unto you that is only true if you’re writing in Latin. Since I’m writing in English, I felt comfortable (one might say safe) ending this way. I feel equally safe to comfortably split infinitives.